Angle(s)

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Music Language Mind Evolution

2015 Arts Dean’s Lecture Series Challenges

How and Why We Create and Hear Music

What do contemporary music and vibrational communication from plants have in common? Quite a lot according to Larry Polansky, Professor
of Music at UC Santa Cruz. As a renowned composer and music theorist,
Polansky thinks very deeply about music and wants to broaden the scope
of how it tends to be categorized. The impressive list of prominent
speakers for the latest Arts Dean’s Lecture Series is a testament to
this enormous diversity. From contemporary music composer Christian
Wolff to acoustic biologist Katy Payne, who studies whale songs and
elephant communication, the series, entitled Music, Language, Mind, Evolution promises to delve into areas of sound that will surprise and amaze.

“It seems to me that there are a number of questions about music that
have to be asked in reference to biology, cognition, and evolution,”
said Polansky. “I’ve been involved in thinking this way for a long time,
and have taught graduate seminars in it in the past. It’s a very
important way to think about music, kind of ‘from scratch,’ trying not
to privilege conventions of style, particular cultures, what people
‘think music is’ or ‘should be.’ Just keeping a very open mind, and
asking, quite simply ‘What is music?’.
When Polansky was putting together the series, his idea was to divide
the eight scholars/artists into four groups: language, biology,
cognition, and music. He made a list of his “dream team” of eight people
he’d ideally want to have participate and, much to his delight, all of
them responded “yes” within just a few hours of receiving his request.
“I was stunned at how easy it was,” said Polansky. “Scheduling them was
quite a different matter!”

The group consists of two very acclaimed and highly experimental musicians—Christian Wolff and Douglas Repetto; two cognitive scientists who are making groundbreaking discoveries—Thalia Wheatley and David Huron; two exceptionally innovative, well known animal, insect and plant communication scholars Katy Payne and Rex Cocroft; and two great thinkers about language—Anniruddh Patel, author of Music, Language and the Brain who studies music and language, and Carol Padden,
a deaf studies scholar and current Dean of Social Sciences at UC San
Diego and MacArthur Fellow who studies non-sonic languages.

“The level of brilliance, creativity and the impact of this group is extraordinary,” said Polansky.Christian Wolff, who has composed more than 200
works to date and has been musically connected to Merce Cunningham and
his dance company since 1952, will be focusing on what the notion of
“experimental music means or could mean. He says of the series: “It
looks like a very interesting series, [covering] many angles on art
issues….Larry Polansky puts together interesting and unusual projects.”

Acoustic biologist Katy Payne has spent decades
doing field work in oceans, savannas and forests, which has led to her
pioneering discoveries of elephants’ use of infrasound (sound below the
frequency range of human hearing) and long-distance communication.
She’ll talk about her work with elephants and illustrate the changing
songs of humpback whales, giving insight to their complex and beautiful
sounds that are evidence of creativity in a non-human animal.
Composer, bio-artist Douglas Repetto, who also
founded the “DorkBot” movement, which made him internationally renowned
in experimental arts, says, “My talk will be on two recent artworks I’ve
made. They’re both part of a series called ‘forever wild’. The first is
‘forever wild (nest machine)’ and the second is ‘forever wild (kill
site record)’. I'll talk about the idea behind the whole series, a few
of the pieces I hope to do in the future, and then I'll spend most of
the talk on those two specific pieces.”
“The lecture series is such an interesting mix of people and
backgrounds,” he continues. “I'm honored to be part of it. I wish I
could go to all the talks! Grouping music, language, mind, and evolution
is a brilliant idea, and provides a nice frame for a broad discussion
of deep topics that are tangled in often non-obvious ways.”
The free, public lecture program is also part of the course Music 007
and will take place Mondays and Wednesdays, 5-6-45 p.m., in the Theater
Arts Center at UC Santa Cruz beginning on Monday, April 6. (All majors
and class levels are welcome, and the course satisfies the IM General
Education requirement.)
Past Arts Dean’s Lecture series also have covered a variety of cutting-edge topics, including New Queer Cinema (2014) that included talks by Dustin Lance Black, Oscar winning screenwriter for Milk, and Engaging the Mind (2013), which featured trailblazing game designer Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims.

2015 Arts Dean’s Lecture Series Music, Language, Mind, Evolution Line-Up:Monday, April 6- Carol Padden Origins of Sign Language Deaf studies scholar and sign language researcher, 2010 MacArthur Fellow and Dean of Social Sciences at UC San DiegoMonday, April 13--Christian Wolff Music and Experiment Widely acknowledged as one of the most important American composers of the 20th century.Monday, April 27--Katy Payne Humpback Whales: Composers in the Sea Acoustic biologist, founder of the Elephant Listening Project, and whale song expert.Wednesday, April 29--Thalia Wheatley Why Music Moves Us Cognitive scientist, leading researcher in the nascent field of perception of emotion Monday, May 4--David Huron Investigating Music's Origins: Making Use of the Pleasure Principle Pioneering and pre-eminent scholar in music cognition and cognitive musicologyMonday, May 11--Rex Cocroft Insects, Plants and Music Groundbreaking researcher in insect and plant intelligence and vibrational communicationMonday, May 18--Douglas Repetto Forever Wild Composer, sound- and bio-artist, founder of the international DorkBot movement.Wednesday, May 27--Aniruddh Patel Hidden Connections Between the Evolution of Music and Language Cognitive scientist, author of the major and innovative work Music, Language, and the Brain

Carol Padden
is a MacArthur “Genius” Award-winning scholar of sign languages. She
holds the Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication at
UC San Diego, is an affiliate member of the Center for Research in
Language, the Human Development Program, and the Department of
Education...

Christian Wolff
is widely acknowledged as one of the most important American composers
of the 20th century. He was born in 1934 in Nice, France, and has lived
in the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and, briefly,
composition with John Cage.

Acoustic biologist, founder of the Elephant Listening Project, and whale song expert Katy Payne
received a BA from Cornell in music and biology in 1959. Since then her
professional work and contributions have all stemmed from original
discoveries at the intersection of these fields. Humpback whales...

Thalia Wheatley,
Ph.D., is an associate professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at
Dartmouth. Dr. Wheatley completed her doctoral training in social
psychology with Timothy Wilson and Daniel Wegner at the University of
Virginia. After graduating, she received neuroimaging training...

Is music an evolutionary
adaptation? This lecture doesn't answer that question. Instead we
consider some of the tools available for addressing the issue. One of
the foremost tools is "following the money" of pleasure: Adaptive
behaviors are encouraged through a combination pleasure and pain. By
examining the...

Rex Cocroft started his
academic career as a piano major, and after graduation decided to pursue
a longstanding interest in the biology of amphibians and reptiles. He
leveraged a childhood love of turtles into a research assistant position
in the Smithsonian herpetology department, where he went on field trips
to...

Douglas Irving Repetto
is an artist and teacher. His work, including sculpture, installation,
performance, recordings, and software is presented internationally. He
is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including
dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity; ArtBots:...

Aniruddh Patel
joined Tufts University in the fall of 2012 as an associate professor
of psychology. Previously he was a senior fellow at The Neurosciences
Institute in San Diego. As a cognitive neuroscientist, he conducts
research that focuses on the relationship between music and language,
using...